Mementó La Mórt

1st Course: PAVEMENT OF TEARS

Mark Vil Rain. 22 years old. A prodigy. Wise beyond his years and successful in his field. An alumni with flying colors! And yet now, none of it mattered.. None of his achievements mean anything anymore...

He walks down the paved streets, no one else around as the snow fell mockingly around him. It is still the first day of winter yet something about this night seemed colder than usual.

Mark trudged down the lonely path, down the red-bricked pavement filmed with a thin layer of ice. He halts suddenly and ever slowly scans his surroundings--eyes haunted with the coldness that seeped through his heart. He realizes the emptiness of the streets, nobody else was there... He was alone... He bent his head back to stare at the dark grey sky as snow fell daintily and laughed humorlessly--eyes dead and a smile that did not quite reach his eyes-the only sound to be heard in harmony to the sad howling of the winter breeze. And as the temperature dropped lower abruptly, Mark's laughter turned for humorless to downright painfully heartless.

As the snowfall built up around his shoulders in a thin layer over his trench coat, freezing the skin beneath it, his heart froze as well... Little by little. His eyes widened, pupils dilated at the potent insanity swallowing him whole. He snapped his head back as he stared down to the ground laughing like a mad man... And he was that exactly.. A mad man.
One hand covered the left side of his face, laughter diminished to chuckling. His tears fell at the same time snow fell to the ground... Tears that froze mid-air and shattered the moment they hit the icy pavement.

"Vivian..." he murmured, gasping in between laughing and crying.
Memories of a woman with wavy red hair with green streaks and reaches past her shoulders. She smelled like strawberries and dark chocolate, eyes bluer than the summer sky but dull with pain, a smile perfected and faked over the years with lips painted as red as her painted nails...

"Vivian..." he gasped

Somewhere down that grey and miserable street, in a dark alley, lay a damned soul's vessel. A body whose life once was worthless and wasted by the cruel world itself. A person who was loved dearly... immensely--but whom did not know that love is not something physical or monetary. Her body lay there, as the pavement lay colder than her clammy corpse. She lay lifeless--red locks sprawled on the ground.. red as the rust-scented bloody goo she lay on; eyes wide open, glazed with death--as it had been left to endlessly stare at the dark, cold, damned alleyway that led out to the streets. Her last memory, of a man who loved her but she who could not do so in return. A fight. Screaming at each other. Death. And the light at the end of the tunnel... The light she could never ever come out to anymore.

"Vivian..." Mark whispered as he walked continuously away from the alley, trudging down the path..

The woman he obssessively loved fading from the world of the living, left inside the womb of darkness and embraced by Death, punished for not giving back the love given to her.

Her, punished by Death. Him, punished by Insanity. Both... victims of the Pavement of Tears.